Virginia Meyer scrunched her forehead as she pored over the pages, feeling a migraine whenever she tried to understand the words. Next to her, Terry Sandhurst, the Chairman of their committee, did the same. Finally, she closed the 300 page proposal for Frontier.
Jim
Macomber leaned forward. “Frontier is too big. We’ve combined nearly every
other deep space mission into this one satellite because we need it more than
the others. The gravity engine, kinetic struts, the deep space monitoring
observatory, and the nanosat launcher.”
“Nanosat
launcher? I don’t think I read that far,” Terry started paging through.
“It’s in
the addendums, a last minute idea by two of my team. They want to begin to map
out the dark energy winds, hopefully to get a better understanding of what’s
going on. Each nanosat consists of a sail, a power source, and a transmitter,
that’s it. All it does is ping back to the monitoring observatory with its
identity, which will relay the signals back here. Before, the monitoring
observatory was going to be more passive, acting as a relay booster for the
covered wagon.”
“Covered
wagon?” Virginia said.
Jim
shrugged. “That’s just a placeholder name. Frontier . . . Covered Wagon? We’ll
come up with something suitably inspiring later.”
“I thought
we had settled on Frontier?” Terry said.
“The entire
vehicle is called Frontier, like Apollo 11 had the Columbia command module and
the Eagle lander.”
“Ah, I see.
So, you were saying?”
“The
observatory will now have a much larger role, that of coordinating the
information from the nanosats, and the nanosat launcher, too. We just can’t fit
everything on one Argo launcher. The plan is to have two Argos launch. We will
remotely pilot them to connect in orbit.” He interlaced his fingers of both
hands. “Then the combined vehicle will head out to the edge of the solar system
as planned.”
“So you
want to double the cost of the launch? I’m sorry, no.” Terry shut his copy of
the proposal with finality. “We have already appropriated millions for this
project.”
“Mr.
Chairman, please let me—”
“No, Jim.
I’m sorry.”
“Terry,”
Virginia said. “Let the man talk. You agreed that this project is probably the
most important since the first moon landing.”
“All right.
Make your sales pitch, Jim.”
“We’re not
doubling the cost. We need two Argos launches, but only one of them is a type
III. The other is a type I, which we usually reserve for crew, but it can also
take a payload module. Launching a type I is half the cost of a type III. We
need an extra 20 million. That’s all.”
Sandhurst
gave a bemused smile to Virginia. “Only 20 million. We could do a lot of good
for 20 million.”
“We have
more in pork on a bill choosing the next stamp. We can do this, and we are doing a lot of good.”
“I suppose
so. Still, it will be a hard sell. Jim, can you get by with anything less?”
Jim put a
hand through his hair. Clearly he had already trimmed the numbers as close as
he could, but he gave a sideways nod. “We can scrape by with 18.”
“Okay.
We’ll get your appropriation, but please choose better names for the craft, and
quickly.”
“Deal,
Terry,” Jerry smiled, stood, and extended his hand.